The Robot Maid of the Future Might Teach Itself How to Do Chores

Some of Silicon Valley's heaviest hitters, including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Reid Hoffman are all backing OpenAI, a non-profit AI research company with a focus on on deep learning. The first challenge on the list? Robot maids that can teach themselves how to clean.

Fetch Robotics currently makes warehouse bots, the type that will follow employees around as they load products for carrying. Fetch also makes the software running their robots, and the plan OpenAI has is to use deep learning to have them train themselves through a process of trial and error. The company has brought on Pieter Abbeel—a professor at the University of California, Berkeley who focuses robot learning—to teach these robots how to learn tasks that are performed by hand, in this case common household tasks.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

It's a deeply ambitious Jetsons-type future project that Musk and fellow investors are known for, although that's no guarantee of results. Abbeel has a good track record with helping robots learn—last year, he and his team from Berkeley got a robot to put a clothes hanger on a rack, assemble a toy plane, and screw a cap on a water bottle without any preprogrammed instructions.

The key, he said in a university press release, was that "when a robot is faced with something new, we won't have to reprogram it. The exact same software, which encodes how the robot can learn, was used to allow the robot to learn all the different tasks we gave it." It's no Rosie yet, but BRETT—the Berkeley Robot for the Elimination of Tedious Tasks—is getting there.